Trademark retrieval is important for applications for trademark registration, trademark examinations, trademark managements, trademark right protections and other procedures. The main purpose of the trademark retrieval is to retrieve a same or similar trademark in the sense of trademark laws to determine the information on the scope of rights of a certain trademark. The predecessor of the World Intellectual Property Organization—the United International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property and International Coordinating Committee founded an Expert Committee to study and draft the international classification of figurative elements of trademarks in 1967. The classification of figurative elements of trademarks was firstly introduced in an agreement signed at the Vienna Diplomatic Conference on Jun. 12, 1973. The International Classification of Figurative Elements of Marks established by the Vienna Convention has been widely used by various countries. This classification is generally considered to be scientific, convenient and easy to operate in the trademark industry, and is an indispensable tool for retrieving figurative trademarks, dividing trademark figurative elements correctly and performing computer-based retrieval for trademark figurative elements for trademark examiners and administrators, trademark searchers, trademark attorneys and trademark applicants.
On one hand, traditional trademark retrieval tools generally perform trademark retrieval by retrieving characters such as Chinese characters, English characters and other languages' characters of a name of a trademark, figurative element code, and items of an application for trademark registration, in response to user input. The traditional trademark retrieval tools generally retrieve figurative element trademarks by manually inputting trademark figurative element codes as the retrieval condition to realise the purpose of retrieval. However, although the traditional trademark figurative retrieval tools may perform retrieval tasks based on trademark information, there are obvious shortcomings and drawbacks, including: high specialization in the coding of the trademark figurative elements that the widespread application of the figurative trademark retrieval is influenced since the ordinary people are not skilled at or even do not know coding. Even for professional coders, they have difference in determining the meaning of the figurative trademark, and such difference may cause a same or similar trademark to be missed. The coding of the trademark figurative elements in the trademark retrieval is substantially based on manual input and subjective judgment, without intelligent means. In addition to the restriction caused by the high specialization, the traditional trademark retrieval tools may lead to low efficiency and enormous amount of labor because there may be generally thousands of entries in a retrieved result matching the input figurative element code, which are required to be checked manually one by one by the staffs to determine if any belongs to a same or similar trademark in the sense of the trademark laws.
On the other hand, with the progress and development of image recognition technologies, the image recognition technologies have been introduced into the field of trademark retrieval to form some methods for trademark retrieval based on image recognition technology, in order to improve the intellectualization of the figurative trademark retrieval. However, although the existing methods for trademark retrieval based on image recognition technology may perform retrieval tasks for trademark information in theory, there are still many shortcomings and drawbacks. For example, the existing methods for trademark retrieval based on image recognition technology do not comply with the international retrieval standard for the coding of the trademark figurative elements, and the trademark retrieval not according to the international standard for the coding of the trademark figurative elements is difficult to retrieve the same or similar trademark under current standard rules of trademark examination, so the existing methods for trademark retrieval based on image recognition technology have not been recognized by the trademark offices and trademark service industries, which are easy to cause the same or similar trademark to be missed, with poor practicability. Therefore, the existing methods for trademark retrieval based on image recognition technology are rarely applied in practice in trademark offices, trademark agencies, trademark services, enterprise trademark management departments, and other professional fields.